New Year Insights for the procurement solutions and services marketplace 2024: Trustpair

For several years now, Spend Matters has been collecting and publishing a series of articles about procurement, supply and services trends for the year ahead from expert tech and service providers in the market.

This year we’re highlighting the customer demands, market movements and advances in procurement tech that are exciting the world of solution providers, how they expect them to shape the S2P landscape next year and how they plan to respond to them.

Our series runs from mid-December to mid-January, then our senior analysts will wrap up with their own take on the key themes that emerge.

In no order of preference, other than by the date they arrived in our inbox, today let’s hear from Baptiste Collot, Co-Founder and CEO of Trustpair, a provider of AP Automation solutions.

AI adoption in procurement sparks urgent need for fraud prevention in 2024

Artificial intelligence is rising in popularity — not just with procurement and finance teams to drive value, but with fraudsters and bad actors. Deepfakes, voice cloning and highly sophisticated phishing attacks are accelerating fraud risks, and protecting against these threats will become a top priority for organizations in 2024.

Access Spend Matters dedicated ‘Artificial Intelligence in Procurement’ page for more AI insights.

Just as fraudsters are becoming more sophisticated in their tactics, procurement teams need to elevate their approach to fighting fraud throughout the entire procure-to-pay (P2P) process.

Today, many companies validate supplier credentials and banking information at the end of the P2P chain, or just before the payment is sent. This is an important final step, but companies are exposed to fraud much earlier in the procurement process. Organizations are vulnerable to vendor payment fraud when new bank accounts are added to their systems during supplier onboarding. Companies are also at risk throughout the entire supplier lifecycle any time a new invoice is submitted or modifications are made to existing accounts given that fraudsters use AI to exploit these changes and usurp supplier identities.

For example, fraudsters can break into a supplier email database, watch how employees write emails to buyers, mimic the tone and style they use, and pretend to be the supplier and communicate directly with buyers about legitimate payments. Fraudsters could ask for procurement to change the bank account details well before an order is placed, making the illegitimate bank account look like a trusted one during the final check before payment. These fraudsters are so sophisticated that it’s impossible for procurement to tell they’re not communicating with a legitimate supplier.

Fraud prevention ownership will start to shift ‘left’ next year, to include the procurement team handling vendor onboarding in addition to the finance teams making payments and everywhere in between. The ‘shift left’ will be enabled by automatic account validation. Procurement will use technology as an asset to automatically validate supplier credentials across the entire lifecycle and instantly flag when an account isn’t associated with a legitimate supplier. Procurement will be able to confirm if a supplier actually exists, the bank account is legitimate and that it correlates with a real supplier, giving procurement teams peace of mind that they’re paying the right vendors and enabling them to protect the business against fraud continuously throughout the supplier lifecycle.

Many thanks to Trustpair for being a part of the series.

Read our senior analyst’s take on the key themes from the series here.

If you need to find the right procurement technology provider or service for your business needs next year, try Spend Matters TechMatch for a free rapid shortlist.

For granular analysis and comparisons of procurement technology solutions, subscribe to Spend Matters Insider.

As always, reach out to discover how Spend Matters can help with your new year commitments and wishes.